Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Alan Cox
2005-12-06T20:36:46Z

On Maw, 2005-12-06 at 01:43 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> As far as I know, many of the recent CVE assignments for kernel
> vulnerabilities have been done by MITRE, requested by individuals
> which are neither known as kernel developers, nor vendor security
> folks (for "vendor" as in "we have our own legal department with real
> lawyers").

Most of them will be because vendors employ security professionals to
handle security CVE work and do all the tedious and terribly important
tracking of bugs v releases and what needs to be fixed by whom and when
- and developers to write code.

> Maybe the source of CVE assignments paints a wrong picture. But if
> the CVE picture is correct, vendor-paid kernel developers help behind
> the scenes, but there is little interest in openly documenting
> security issues, so that users (and what kernel.org considers fringe
> distros) can apply the relevant patches if they use kernel.org
> kernels.

The 2.6.x.y maintainers are directly involved in security@kernel.org
last time I checked.

> database. But the only answers we get is that everything is fine,
> vendors handle the situation, security@kernel.org actually does this
> already, etc.

Having someone doing that on kernel.org sounds a good plan